Five Words - Bertie Wooster
by Sally Mn
Summary: For a challenge I was given five words and had to write ficlets on each for Bertie. The words were buttercups, TARDIS, silk stockings, sika deer, and marathon... obvious if slight crossover in the second one :)


**Five Words... Bertie Wooster**

**Buttercups**

Good lord, and I thought Madeline Bassett was the most unspeakable blot on the escutcheon of womanhood possible.

Only fair to say, really, that she still is. But Aunt Agatha's latest candidate for the role of Mrs Bertram Wilberforce Wooster makes Madeleine seem like a positive pip of a girl. Not that the Honourable Buttercup Bledlowe is drippy in the style that Madeline has made so completely her own (and who else would want it, enquiring minds have to ask?) No, Buttercup _beams._ And sparkles. And _never stops smiling. _

Not even when Aunt Agatha painted a picture of connubial bliss that would cause stronger men than yours truly to quail.

And then, doubtless in the cause of civil converse, Buttercup proceeded to tell us the lengthy and absolutely heart-rending tale of why her parents bestowed such an appalling moniker on her. I have to say that the old noggin congealed somewhat about ten minutes in, so the lurid details must ever be left in the murk one can't help feeling they belong in, but it had something to do with the first day of spring (which, of you ask me, has a lot of mush and soppiness to answer for in general) and batting at one's chin with the blossoms to see if one likes butter. Myself, I'd be more inclined to actually taste the stuff but years of dealing with Madeline has taught me a thing or two about _not_ arguing with batty females.

And Aunt Agatha was congealing herself by that time, not really surprising but making her look even more like a disgruntled gargoyle and rather distracting, what? In any case, the whole sorry saga would seem to my understanding - which, I might add, is not as feeble as some would have but is surely up to such lofty matters as the buttercups that bloom in the spring - as I was saying, it would seem to prove once again how one's mental facilities can be rotted by ardour... or possibly something else, I'll have to ask Jeeves.

... at the same time as I ask Jeeves how to wriggle out of yet another engagement I don't seem to have noticed myself getting entangled in...

**~oOo~**

**The TARDIS**

Jolly unfair, that's what I call it. I mean really. You'd think the Doctor didn't bally well trust me... just because I might have been the one who broke his blessed chameleon contraption the first time he dropped in for dinner at Brinkley Court, several faces ago (rum thing that, Jeeves - clever cove that he is - explained it at great length but blessed if I could quite follow...) I mean to say, he got the dashed thing going long enough to change it to that rum box shape, didn't he? Myself, I rather thought the giant silver salt cellar had far more _je ne sais quoi_, even if all those rococo cherubs _did _look a bit like halfwitted Pekes.

Honestly, anyone would think _Bertram _was the one who dropped it upside down on Aunt Dahlia's rose garden in the first place.

And it's not that I'm exactly eager to drive the blessed flying contraption. No one would seriously call the Wooster pluck into question, but it has to be admitted that the Wooster sense of discretion recalls with appalling clarity being chased around primordial swamps by overteethed parrots with a horrifying resemblance to a flock of aggrieved Glossops...

**~oOo~**

**Silk Stockings**

For once, I admit, the silver tongue for which Bertram is known and loved far and wide was deucedly out of tune and kilter, and I found myself with no words.

No words at all.

I have to say it put me in mind of that nasty business Shakespeare blathered about, when the chap Macbeth's dinner was interrupted by the chap he'd done away with - something you really don't want to have to deal with in between your _Consomme aux Pommes d'Amour _and your _Sylphides a la creme de _Something or Other and it puts him right off his feed.

On the other hand, Macbeth only had this dead pal shaking his gory locks at him to deal with, not the simplest thing in the world to explain away with a fine, vague wave of the hand, but infinitely simpler than the silk stockings, artfully dangling - or so it may have seemed to the paralysed goggling of pretty much all of my kith and kin - from the light fixture directly above the soup tureen like the sword of... what was the cove's name? Jeeves would know...

**Sika Deer**

Strange as it must seem to my nearest and dearest - such as they are, sometimes it must be admitted that the Wooster clan is not as near and dear as they jolly well ought to be when trouble strikes and the call for familial support must be trumpeted - strange as it seems, it has to be said that yours truly has a fraught relationship with fauna of all types. Dogs bite, cats - don't talk to me about cats, old bean - cats claw, and even the odd parrot will forsake his cracker for a nip of Bertie.

Rum go, really, but something I've learned to love with. After all, what real harm can the little blighters do?

Pity that, right at this minute, I'm not being eyeballed, so to speak, by a little blighter but by a big one. And said eyeballs are not only rolling, but in their bloodshot antipathy, presaging something of an intent decidedly more evil than an Aunt on a rampage.

I _told_ Chuffy that a deer park was not the place to take those loathsome nephews of his for a picnic, but do any of my pals, my chums, my life-long friends listen to me?

**~oOo~**

**Marathon**

Now let me see if I have this all well and tickety-boo, Jeeves. I'm expected - by Biffy, and Percy, and Gussie, and Cedric - and above all by the foul old blister Roderick Glossop - to enter this marathon run thing, pay for the privilege, and then spend the better part of this dew-pearled - is that the word I'm looking for, Jeeves? - dew-pearled spring day running down a dashed deadly country road in an effort to do so faster than Honoria's new cloth-headed but iron-limbed swain?

Ah no, my error.

I'm expected to enter this marathon run thingummy, pay for the privilege, and then spend the better part of the day running down the same dashed deadly country road in an effort to not do so faster than Honoria's new cloth-headed but iron-limbed swain.

And _why_ am I expected to enter this marathon run thingummy, pay for the privilege, and so on and so forth?

Because Honoria will then be struck with a touch - or better still, a lightning bolt - of _Soul's Awakening, _and fall into his arms? And Biffy, and Percy, and Gussie, and Cedric, and most importantly, Bertram Wooster, will be forever delivered from the spectre of matrimony?

Yes... I see.

Well, no sacrifice is too great, and all that, eh Jeeves?

Lead on, as that Shakespeare chappie said, and dashed be him who first cries... hold on, _what_ hour in the morning?

**-the end-**


End file.
